Rename multiple columns by names

Question

Someone should have asked this already  but I couldn t find an answer  Say I have   x   data frame q 1 w 2 e 3     and many many columns         what is the most elegant way to rename an arbitrary subset of columns  whose position I don t necessarily know  into some other arbitrary names   e g  Say I want to rename  q  and  e  into  A  and  B   what is the most elegant code to do this   Obviously  I can do a loop   oldnames   c  q   e   newnames   c  A   B   for i in 1 2  names x  names x     oldnames i     newnames i    But I wonder if there is a better way  Maybe using some of the packages   plyr  rename etc

User · Answer

There are a few answers mentioning the functions dplyr::rename_with and rlang::set_names already. By they are separate. this answer illustrates the differences between the two and the use of functions and formulas to rename columns.

rename_with from the dplyr package can use either a function or a formula to rename a selection of columns given as the .cols argument. For example passing the function name toupper:

library(dplyr)
rename_with(head(iris), toupper, starts_with("Petal"))

Is equivalent to passing the formula ~ toupper(.x):

rename_with(head(iris), ~ toupper(.x), starts_with("Petal"))

When renaming all columns, you can also use set_names from the rlang package. To make a different example, let's use paste0 as a renaming function. pasteO takes 2 arguments, as a result there are different ways to pass the second argument depending on whether we use a function or a formula.

rlang::set_names(head(iris), paste0, "_hi")
rlang::set_names(head(iris), ~ paste0(.x, "_hi"))

The same can be achieved with rename_with by passing the data frame as first argument .data, the function as second argument .fn, all columns as third argument .cols=everything() and the function parameters as the fourth argument .... Alternatively you can place the second, third and fourth arguments in a formula given as the second argument.

rename_with(head(iris), paste0, everything(), "_hi")
rename_with(head(iris), ~ paste0(.x, "_hi"))

rename_with only works with data frames. set_names is more generic and can also perform vector renaming

rlang::set_names(1:4, c("a", "b", "c", "d"))

User · Answer

This would change all the occurrences of those letters in all names    names x   lt - gsub  q    A   gsub  e    B   names x

User · Answer

You can use a named vector    With base R  maybe somewhat clunky    x   data frame q   1  w   2  e   3    rename vec  lt - c q    A   e    B    names x   lt - ifelse is na rename vec names x     names x   rename vec names x     x   gt    A w B   gt  1 1 2 3   Or a dplyr option with       library dplyr   rename vec  lt - c A    q   B    e     the names are just the other way round than in the base R way   x   gt   rename    rename vec    gt    A w B   gt  1 1 2 3   The latter works because the  big-bang  operator     is forcing evaluation of a list or a vector      grave    grave           forces-splice a list of objects  The elements of the list are   spliced in place  meaning that they each become one single argument

User · Answer

You can get the name set  save it as a list  and then do your bulk renaming on the string  A good example of this is when you are doing a long to wide transition on a dataset   names labWide        Lab1    Lab10    Lab11    Lab12    Lab13    Lab14    Lab15    Lab16 1 35 75366 22 79493 30 32075 34 25637 30 66477 32 04059 24 46663 22 53063  nameVec  lt - names labWide  nameVec  lt - gsub  Lab   LabLat  nameVec   names labWide   lt - nameVec  LabLat1    LabLat10   LabLat11   LabLat12   LabLat13   LabLat14  LabLat15      LabLat16

User · Answer

With dplyr you would do  library dplyr   df   data frame q   1  w   2  e   3       df   gt   rename A   q  B   e      A w B  1 1 2 3  Or if you want to use vectors  as suggested by  Jelena-bioinf  library dplyr   df   data frame q   1  w   2  e   3   oldnames   c  quot q quot   quot e quot   newnames   c  quot A quot   quot B quot    df   gt   rename at vars oldnames     newnames      A w B  1 1 2 3  L  D  Nicolas May suggested a change given rename at is being superseded by rename with  df   gt      rename with   newnames which oldnames     x     cols   oldnames      A w B  1 1 2 3

User · Answer

If the table contains two columns with the same name then the code goes like this   rename df newname oldname x newname oldname y

User · Answer

So I recently ran into this myself  if you re not sure if the columns exist and only want to rename those that do    existing  lt - match oldNames names x   names x  na omit existing    lt - newNames which  is na existing

User · Answer

Lot s of sort-of-answers  so I just wrote the function so you can copy paste    rename  lt - function x  old names  new names        stopifnot length old names     length new names         pull out the names that are actually in x     old nms  lt - old names old names  in  names x       new nms  lt - new names old names  in  names x          call out the column names that don t exist     not nms  lt - setdiff old names  old nms      if length not nms   gt  0            msg  lt - paste paste not nms  collapse                        are not columns in the dataframe  so won t be renamed            warning msg               rename     names x  names x   in  old nms   lt - new nms     x     x   data frame q   1  w   2  e   3   rename x  c  q    e    c  Q    E        Q w E  1 1 2 3

User · Answer

setnames from the data tablepackage will work on data frames or data tables  library data table  d  lt - data frame a 1 2 b 2 3 d 4 5  setnames d  old   c  a   d    new   c  anew   dnew    d        anew b dnew    1    1 2    4    2    2 3    5   Note that changes are made by reference  so no copying  even for data frames

User · Answer

This is the function that you need  Then just pass the x in a rename X  and it will rename all values that appear and if it isn t in there it won t error  rename  lt -function x     oldNames   c  a   b   c     newNames   c  d   e   f     existing  lt - match oldNames names x     names x  na omit existing    lt - newNames which  is na existing      return x

User · Answer

Update dplyr 1 0 0 The newest dplyr version became more flexible by adding rename with   where  with  refers to a function as input  The trick is to reformulate the character vector newnames into a formula  by     so it would be equivalent to function x  return  newnames   In my subjective opinion  that is the most elegant dplyr expression    shortest  amp  most elegant expression df   gt   rename with   newnames  oldnames   A w B 1 1 2 3  Side note  If you reverse the order  argument  fn must be specified as  fn is expected before  cols argument  df   gt   rename with oldnames   fn     newnames   A w B 1 1 2 3

User · Answer

Another solution for dataframes which are not too large is  building on  thelatemail answer    x  lt - data frame q 1 w 2 e 3    gt  x   q w e 1 1 2 3  colnames x   lt - c  A   w   B     gt  x   A w B 1 1 2 3   Alternatively  you can also use   names x   lt - c  C   w   D     gt  x   C w D 1 1 2 3   Furthermore  you can also rename a subset of the columnnames   names x  2 3   lt - c  E   F     gt  x   C E F 1 1 2 3

User · Answer

If one row of the data contains the names you want to change all columns to you can do  names data   lt - data row     Given data is your dataframe and row is the row number containing the new values   Then you can remove the row containing the names with  data  lt - data -row

User · Answer

names x  names x   in  c  q   e    lt -c  A   B

User · Answer

Sidenote  if you want to concatenate one string to all of the column names  you can just use this simple code   colnames df   lt - paste  renamed   colnames df  sep

User · Answer

Building on  user3114046 s answer   x  lt - data frame q 1 w 2 e 3  x    q w e  1 1 2 3  names x  match oldnames names x     lt - newnames  x    A w B  1 1 2 3   This won t be reliant on a specific ordering of columns in the x dataset

User · Answer

Here is the most efficient way I have found to rename multiple columns using a combination of purrr  set names   and a few stringr operations   library tidyverse     Make a tibble with bad names data  lt - tibble       Bad NameS 1    letters 1 10        bAd NameS 2    rnorm 10     data    A tibble  10 x 2     Bad NameS 1   bAd NameS 2      lt chr gt                   lt dbl gt   1 a                    -0 840  2 b                    -1 56   3 c                    -0 625  4 d                     0 506  5 e                    -1 52   6 f                    -0 212  7 g                    -1 50   8 h                    -1 53   9 i                     0 420  10 j                     0 957    Use purrr  set names   with annonymous function of stringr operations data   gt       set names   str to lower      gt                     str replace all             gt                     str replace all  bad    good       A tibble  10 x 2    good names 1 good names 2     lt chr gt                 lt dbl gt   1 a                  -0 840  2 b                  -1 56   3 c                  -0 625  4 d                   0 506  5 e                  -1 52   6 f                  -0 212  7 g                  -1 50   8 h                  -1 53   9 i                   0 420 10 j                   0 957

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